What Should Your AR Programme Stop Doing?

When an Analyst Relations team is stretched, adding another priority is easy. Deciding which existing commitment should give way is harder. The calendar keeps filling while preparation, evidence gathering and follow-through compete for the time left between meetings.

A useful capacity review starts with the work already being done. Which activities support a current business objective? Which exist because somebody requested them once? Which are necessary but could be handled more simply? Answering those questions gives the team and its sponsor a basis for deciding what should change.

Look at the whole commitment

A briefing occupies more than its slot in the diary. There is analyst research, internal coordination, preparation, the conversation itself and any promised follow-up. An evaluation response may require contributions from product, finance and customer teams. Counting only the visible meeting or deadline understates the capacity involved.

Take a representative period and group the work into a few recognisable activities. Include recurring reporting, requests from sales, research monitoring, administration and unexpected work. Use enough detail to see patterns without turning the review into another substantial task.

Explain the purpose to the team before collecting anything: to improve priorities and support, rather than compare individuals by how busy they appear. Record why work happened and what prevented it progressing. Waiting for an approval and producing an answer are different problems, even when both delay delivery.

Ask who uses the result

For each recurring activity, identify its recipient and the decision it supports. A research digest might help product leaders identify questions to investigate. A briefing note might prepare an executive for a particular conversation. If neither the audience nor the intended use is clear, speak to the people receiving it.

Do not treat low visibility as proof of low value. Maintaining accurate analyst records or checking customer permissions may attract little attention until something goes wrong. Equally, a report with a senior distribution list does not automatically deserve its current frequency or length.

Ask what would happen if the activity changed. Would someone lose information needed for a decision? Would a commitment be missed? Could a shorter update, a different owner or a less frequent review meet the same need? Those answers are more useful than a general judgement that the task feels administrative.

Choose the right change

Some work can stop because its purpose has expired. Other work needs a simpler method, clearer ownership or a different place in the schedule. Treat these as separate decisions.

For example, consider an illustrative weekly report that repeats information already available in a shared record. If its recipients need only exceptions requiring a decision, the team could replace the repeated summary with a shorter exception update. Confirm that need with the recipients before changing the report.

A product evidence request presents a different issue. AR may coordinate the response, but a product owner must validate the capability being described. Repeatedly asking AR to reconstruct the answer from scattered material creates avoidable work and weakens accountability. Agree where the approved evidence lives and who maintains it.

Automation can help with routine collection and reminders once the process is clear. Keep human responsibility for interpreting feedback, validating claims and deciding what can be shared. Automating an unclear request can simply produce more of the wrong output.

Protect the commitments that matter

Before stopping anything, check upcoming research deadlines, promises to analysts, active sales requests and dependencies on other teams. A quiet activity may still be essential to a time-sensitive commitment.

Record the proposed change, its owner and the people affected. If responsibility moves, confirm that the receiving person has the information, authority and capacity to take it on. A task has not been delegated successfully just because another name appears beside it.

Bring contested choices to the programme sponsor. When two priorities cannot both be delivered with the available resources, leadership needs to make that trade-off explicit. AR should be able to explain the consequences of each choice without promising to absorb everything.

Decide where the time goes next

Freed capacity needs a purpose. It might go towards preparing customer evidence, resolving an analyst’s unanswered question or helping sales use research appropriately. Agree that allocation at the same time as the decision to reduce other work.

At the next review, check whether the change helped. Did the recipient still get what they needed? Did important follow-up improve? Has the old task returned under a different name? Time saved is useful evidence of capacity; it does not by itself establish commercial impact.

Start with one recurring activity. Confirm who uses it, what decision it supports and whether a simpler approach would work. Make one agreed change, protect any dependencies and review the result before extending the exercise across the programme.